


Pick a Star

by Mia_Zeklos



Series: Steven Moffat Appreciation Week [3]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Episode: s02e04 The Girl in the Fireplace, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-13
Updated: 2014-11-13
Packaged: 2018-02-25 06:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2611631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mia_Zeklos/pseuds/Mia_Zeklos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mere sight of stars had never hurt so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pick a Star

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Day Three of the Steven Moffat Appreciation Week – 'favourite work or an underappreciated one’ – and I chose the latter. ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’ was a brilliant episode and it’s often overlooked for some reason.  
> These prompts seem to bring out never-written-before things – Rose and Mickey are a first for me and Rose was especially tricky to handle, so I hope I got her right and I’d love to hear what you think.

For a while after leaving the empty ship, the stars were unbearable for him too look at.

 

It was stupid, really, because the Doctor had lost people before, more than he could possibly count, and he’d only known her for a few hours. So why did it hurt so much?

 

Pick a star. Any star. It seemed arrogant, especially from the point of view he had now, to say it. The connection between the two places – France and the spaceship – had been so fragile that he wasn’t sure why he’d even hoped that he’d get it right.

 

So he drifted around now, the TARDIS making her lonely way among the stars he was unwilling to see again. Rose and Mickey did their best to help him – which meant that they were as delicate as possible and tried not to mention anything about what had happened – until one day, Rose couldn’t take the silence anymore. The tension in the room was thick enough for him to be able to cut through it – perhaps with an axe – and he’d known that she’d do something about it soon.

 

“Why don’t you go back?” she asked, sitting down by the console next to him. “Y’know, with the TARDIS? You could try to go back to the same moment you left; you don’t have to depend on the windows to France anymore.”

 

Okay, he’d expected _something_. Definitely not _that_. He prided himself in knowing Rose quite well and had thought that she’d try to distract him instead of bringing him back to the problem at hand; she was a creature of the moment, most of the time.

 

He shook his head. He hadn’t even tried to go through the chances he could technically have because in the end, he knew that nothing would be possible, no matter how flexible his decision happened to be. “I can’t,” he said curtly and Rose frowned.

 

“Why not? Oh, let me guess,” she added when he didn’t respond immediately. “A paradox.”

 

The Doctor nodded. “A paradox,” he echoed and then tried to explain. ‘If I go back now, it’ll mean that I’ll find her before she died, and if I do, then I wouldn’t have had to come back at all because she wouldn’t have been dead and I wouldn’t have been forced to take that decision, which makes it impossible.”

 

Rose stared at him without blinking. “I think you just broke my brain.”

 

The Doctor finally found it in himself to smile and, even if it was a hardly noticeable smile and a bit hesitant, it was still a start.

 

“I think she knew,” he said quietly and Rose looked at him again, surprised by the sudden change of topic. “Reinette,” he added. It was the first time he’d said her name since he’d came back on the TARDIS and something inside him twisted yet again with the guilt he’d tried to repress for the past several days. “I think she knew that I might not make it and that was why she wrote the letter.” Rose just placed her hand on his shoulder in silent support and he continued. “After all, there were always big gaps between the appearances. Maybe she didn’t believe me at all when I told her I was coming.” He knew that he was trying to convince himself rather than Rose, but it didn’t matter.

 

After all, he’d always lied best when he’d lied to himself.

 

“She didn’t blame you,” Mickey said as he walked in the control room. He’d been blending in more and more during the last week and the Doctor tried to appreciate the input, whether it happened to be the truth or not.

 

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, voice even lower than before. “All it matters is that I betrayed her trust.”

 

“But you saved her,” Rose put in impatiently and he smiled again. If there was one thing Rose didn’t like, it was people wallowing in self-pity. Especially _him_ wallowing in self-pity. “You saved her and everyone she knew. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

 

“It does,” he said, a bit peeved – which had probably been the point and Rose had tried to get any emotion at all out of him. “Every life matters. But I _lied_ to her.”

 

“You didn’t,” Rose shot back quickly. “There was nothing you could do. Nothing,” she stressed when he tried to object. “Is that clear?”

 

The Doctor nodded quickly. “Yes,” he assured quietly. “Perfectly clear.”

 

He got up and started setting the coordinates of a planet Mickey and Rose would probably like to visit and, as his companions discussed their next destination, the Doctor stared at one of the screens showing the outside world – which, in this case, was deep space.

 

There were millions of billions stars out there, many of which would never be found and named, so he was allowed to call them whatever he wanted – if not anywhere else, then at least in the TARDIS’s database.

 

He could pick a star and name it after her.


End file.
